Here's the classic, "This is London," ID of the BBC World Service, the good one, not the weenie one they use now. It's followed, as it darn well ought to be, by the "Lilliburlero" folk tune, the time beeps, and the time in GMT, aka BBCMT since they don't keep it in Greenwich any more. The BBCWS English service is definitely a tiny shell of its former self, so enjoy this wonderful ID as a reminder of better days.

BBC Bottom of Hour (MP3)

Lots of people associate Big Ben with the BBC, so here it is, even though BBC seems to be too hip to do this one much any more either. What's cool is that the bells are live. They briefly turn on a mike in the tower. If anyone's working up there, and they say something bad at the wrong time, well that's just a bloody bad show.

Here's the WWV "Geoalert" announcement for the last sunspot cycle's highest daily solar flux, a 327, in March of 1989. I actually drove across town, to the big solar telescope at the Griffith Observatory. The poor sun looked like a bad case of zits. Cycle 23, which peaked in late 2000 with daily fluxes in the 250s, will never top this. Never, never, never.

This is a USB channel marker, probably from the 8 MHz band, once repeated day and night by LPL, General Pacheco Radio, a public maritime coastal radiotelephone station in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Note the rather tuneless, 5-note, musical theme at the beginning. I presume this was for getting receivers dead on-channel by ear. This marker vanished a few years back. For a while, there was sometimes a vaguely British Telecom-sounding ring tone on the frequencies, then - nothing.

Clarion call and Spanish "Last News" (second coming?) program on this old U.S. Bible-thumper.

Here in California, I heard this ominous time-bomb marker exactly once. It's USB, from Norddeich Radio, a maritime coastal station in Germany. It was in just long enough for me to start the tape, and in that halcyon age of 1989, it was indeed tape. Then the station faded - forever. Now it is off the air, replaced by GMDSS.

This one always pops up in net discussions of the great moments in onda-corta. The poor NHK announcer is doing a pretty good job with his English until they make him say "chlorofluorocarbons". Hope he got combat pay.

Radio Prague's trumpets and ID, right before Czechoslovakia broke up. Doppler processing is courtesy some really fine aurora.

This is a genuine, Cold War relic, from the Greek language service of the Bulgarian National Radio. We hear a Communist youth march, then "Milai Sofia," ("This is Sofia") from the classic, propaganda-mill, male and female voices. Again, some truly impressive aurora.

For whatever reason, RHC had two music cues before its top of hour ID. There was the lousy one, on the English language service, and this really great, tropical one on the Spanish broadcast. The flutes are much easier to hear on this one, when they send "RHC" in Morse code, and the horns will make you crave a rum and Coke.

Radio Havana is usually more interesting after its sign-off for the night than when the program is on. The transmitter carrier stays on for an unpredictable length of time, and everything from spy "numbers" to backward opera music appears, fully modulated, in the interval. The best is when, for reasons known only to the inscrutable brains of Cuban radio engineers, they run anywhere from a minute to an hour of Radio Reloj ("Clock Radio"). It's the only time we ever get to hear this popular Cuban AM station that invented all-news radio, and probably post-modern AM in general, way back in the 1950s. This has to be the tightest radio format anywhere, and certainly one of the weirdest, with its ticking clock, Morse code "RR" at the top of every minute, and rapid-fire news in Spanish, invariably by two fast talkers who alternate deep breaths with 25-second stories. Remarkable.

Here's another Cold War relic, but this one is still on, louder than ever. "Govarit Pyongyang" is Russian for "Pyongyang speaking," transmitter ID for the Russian-language broadcast service of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, where 1953 never ends. Thrill to ominous 50-Hz hum, phase shifted interval signals, brave Communist announcements, and finally an appropriately distorted national anthem. Retro-cool audio clipping is all theirs, at no extra charge to glorious Worker.

The old, and sorely missed, interval signal once played for hours by Radio South Africa, with the guitar theme and the regional bird song.

When the weather is bad at Cape Canaveral, the space shuttle lands at Edwards AFB, northeast of Los Angeles. If the orbit is just right, a distinctive, double sonic boom rattles L.A.. Here's an old microphone recording of the best boom ever, though a couple in late 2000/ early 2001 were nearly as good. Imagine these around 20 acoustic dB louder, and rolling over the land like thunder.

7255 kHz used to be a ham radio emergency frequency. Here's one of the reasons it isn't anymore. We hear the signature talking drums, then part of the national anthem, finally a voice ID. The anthem always sounds just as out of tune live. Don't blame the recording! (Edited somewhat)

This is the best example of dual-path echo I've ever recorded, in a Sunday broadcast of Christian Science Radio. The powerful transmitter is beaming away from us, and conditions are so good that signals come both the short way, about 2000 miles in this case, and the long way, pretty much clear around the world and delayed by the trip. Path losses perfectly offset antenna gain, and it's usually a tossup as to which echo is going to win. It's an awesome proof that we're living on a planet, but it's also probably not the best idea to listen with a headache.

This concerto for ionosphere and orchestra left the transmitter as modern classical, but arrived here sounding more like Handel's Water Music after the boat sank. It has to be the heaviest phase distortion I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of phase distortion. Probably Deutsche Welle by backscatter, but I became vaguely nauseous long before I could identify. Again, DO NOT listen with a headache!

This vaguely disturbing noise on 6817 kHz has been likened to lonely whales, Frank Zappa music, and broken synthesizers. More likely, it's malfunctioning U.S. military equipment, though the few who know aren't telling.